Magzdown

Beautiful markdown reading in Obsidian, powered by magzdown.com.

Magzdown is a magazine-style reader that turns your notes into immersive, typographically refined reading sessions. This plugin embeds the Magzdown reader in a side pane so you can write in Obsidian and read what you write — live, in a different font, with the active note mirrored in real time.

The Magzdown pane rendering a note alongside the Obsidian editor.

Install

Magzdown is an official community plugin:

1. Open Settings → Community plugins → Browse and search for Magzdown.
2. Click Install, then Enable.
3. Click the Magzdown ribbon icon (a book) to open the reading pane, or run Open Magzdown preview from the command palette.

Features

• Live preview: The active note renders in the Magzdown pane as you type, with a 500ms debounce so it stays responsive.
• Frontmatter aware: title, author, and date from YAML frontmatter become a byline with reading time in the reader.
• Eight reading styles: Presets modeled on real magazine genres — literary Classic, graphic Modern, art-directed Editorial, Swiss Minimal, fashion-glossy Couture, news-weekly Gazette, tech-magazine Pulse, and the slab-serif Headliner.
• Print-grade typography: Drop caps, decks from an opening italic line, small-caps openers, true italics, and footnotes as margin notes on wide panes.
• Light and dark: Color mode respects your preference and applies instantly.
• Two layouts: Continuous scroll or page-by-page paginated reading with print-style running heads and page folios.
• Graceful errors: If the reader fails to load, the pane shows a recovery message with a retry action.

Settings

Open Settings → Magzdown to configure:

• Color mode — Light or dark theme for the Magzdown reading pane.
• Layout — Scroll for continuous reading, paginated for page-by-page.
• Style preset — Typographic preset for the reader. Changes font, rhythm, and margins.
• Embed URL (advanced) — Override the Magzdown embed URL. Leave as default unless you are developing locally.

Changes apply instantly in any open Magzdown pane — no save button. The pane's own toolbar offers further typography controls: fonts, color themes, and text alignment.

Free and Pro

The plugin is free and open source (MIT). The embedded Magzdown reader is free to use — all eight style presets' defaults, print typography, and both layouts included. The magzdown.com webapp offers an optional one-time Pro purchase that unlocks extra color themes, fonts, theme packs, and PDF/EPUB export; nothing in the plugin's core reading flow requires it.

Requirements

• Obsidian Desktop (this plugin is desktop-only; Obsidian Mobile lacks the iframe support Magzdown needs).
• An internet connection — the reader is loaded from https://www.magzdown.com/embed.

Privacy

The plugin sends your active note's markdown content and basic frontmatter (title, author, date) to https://www.magzdown.com/embed via the browser's postMessage API, scoped to the magzdown.com origin. No content is stored on magzdown.com servers — the reader is fully client-side.

Contributing and releases

See RELEASING.md for the release workflow.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.